Today is an exciting day in the ColdFusion community: Macromedia has released the latest version of ColdFusion ? ColdFusion MX 7. This new version of ColdFusion represents a significant step forward in a number of areas for ColdFusion, including enhanced object-oriented capabilities, enhanced forms, new reporting features, support for a range of event-based development, and new enterprise features.

In fact, a detailed overview of these new features would be lengthier than a single introductory article allows. The reviewers guide for the final Release Candidate of ColdFusion MX 7 covered just a selection of the new features and measured 17 pages in length.

This article will discuss a selection of these features and, where relevant, will provide screen shots which illustrate these new features in action. Finally, we will briefly discuss the two versions of ColdFusion MX 7 (Standard and Enterprise) to see what features are available in each edition.

A Quick Feature Overview

Before taking a closer look at selected new features of ColdFusion MX 7, let's take a quick look at the the most significant new features:

Branded, template-driven report generation. These reports can be created as PDF files, Microsoft Excel files or Macromedia FlashPaper documents and can include charts.

On-the fly document conversion. ColdFusion MX 7 can convert HTML or CFML output to PDF or FlashPaper documents on demand. This feature allows for control of page breaks, document headers and footers, and page numbering.

Skinnable, Flash-based, rich forms. In the past ColdFusion provided a limited set of extended form widgets which were Java applet-based. In ColdFusion MX 7, complete Flash-based forms can be generated and these forms can be skinned by providing transformation rules from XML to HTML. In addition, you can build standard HTML forms using selected extended widgets, which are now Flash-based.

Improved form validation. Form validation has been enhanced in a number of ways, including validation when a user removes focus from a field (instead of only on submission of a form), a simplified server-based validation implementation, validation of textarea fields, and improved cross-platform consistency.

Support for event gateways. The new Event Gateway API allow ColdFusion to respond to external events. For instance, a gateway could be built to respond to messages from an instant messaging system allowing for requests to be made to a ColdFusion application from an IM client. There are pre-built gateways for SMS messages from mobile devices, the XMPP instant messaging protocol, and the Lotus Sametime instant messaging system.

Events added to the application framework. Using the new Application.cfc allows you to create methods which are triggered by events in your application, such as the start of an application or session or request, their completion or an error. This allows development in ColdFusion to resemble, at least somewhat, the event-driven programming common in other languages.

Improvements to Verity. The search engine underneath ColdFusion has been upgraded and now supports improved result output (such as document authors), suggestions for correcting spellings of potentially misspelled keywords, searching inside search results, categorization of documents and results.

Control of ColdFusion Settings from within Applications. A new Administrator API allows you to create datasources, adjust mappings and change other Administrator settings from within your applications.

Quick and easy creation of login screens. Through a Dreamweaver MX 2004 extension, the Login Wizard allows for the quick deployment of a login screen that supports usernames and passwords, Windows domains and LDAP servers.

Improved XML support. ColdFusion's XML capabilities include new functions, support for decision-making functions, validation of attributes, and support for both Schemas and DTDs.

Sourceless deployment. Your ColdFusion applications can be compiled to Java byte codes and deployed on ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise edition.

Packaged deployment. Your applications can be be bundled into EAR or WAR files containing your ColdFusion files, your settings and the ColdFusion application itself, which can then be deployed quickly on another J2EE server.

In addition, ColdFusion MX 7 includes improvements to specific tags and features which are not completely new features but enhance the behaviour and performance of existing ColdFusion capabilities.

In the rest of this article we will take a closer look at the following new features:

PDF and FlashPaper document creation

Rich forms

Reporting

Application events

Event gateways